Life, the Universe, and everything

Thoughts on life, the Middle East, and just about everything else.

Saturday, October 12, 2002

UPDATE on today's Islamofascist terrorist attack in Bali.
UPI reports: The death toll from a series of explosions that rocked Indonesia's famous tourist island of Bali climbed to 150 Sunday and more than 200 others -- some from the United States, Canada, France, Germany and Australia -- are being treated for their injuries, many severe. Officials at Bali's main hospital said the death toll could rise as more and more bodies arrive.

Friday Sermon on Qatar Government TV, 7 June 2002:
"O God, destroy the Jews, the Christians, and their supporters.
O God, destroy them because they are within your power.
O God, do not raise their banner.
O God, make their wives widows, make their children orphans, and make them a prey for Muslims.
O God, destroy them and divide them. O God, instill fear in their hearts. O God, support the mujahidin everywhere."

14 June 2002, sermon Dr. Ahmad Umar Hashim on Egyptian Satellite Channel (head of al-Azhar University of Cairo, supreme head of the world Muslim youth, and member of the Egyptian higher Sufi council):
"O Lord, make us victorious over your enemies, the enemies of religion. O Lord, defeat the Jews your enemies, the enemies of religion.
O Lord, make us victorious over the infidels."

June 27, 2002, Video promoting martyrdom,, featuring virgins in paradise, aired on official Palestinian Television.
"The young man clearly starts thinking about how to strike out at the Israeli soldiers. Almost immediately, the music changes to a more optimistic tone as, out of a kind of mist, stunningly beautiful young women-between 18 and 22 years of age-begin to beckon to him.... The gorgeous women, who are younger than his wife, are all clad in billowy white robes. They are all smiling fetchingly as they call to him, making motions with their hands as if to say "come-here" and "join us."
"He appears as a target in the cross-hairs of an Israeli automatic rifle. The camera moves quickly .. to the new Palestinian martyr who is smiling in paradise. One of the gorgeous women in white greets him and pulls him into the mist where she and seven or eight beautiful women begin to surround him and gently caress him."

June 28th, 2002 sermon on Saudi Arabia TV2 official television, live sermon from the holy mosque in Medina.
"O God, strengthen Islam and Muslims, humiliate infidelity and infidels, destroy the enemies of Islam, and give safety to this country and to Muslims everywhere. O God give us security in our homeland and give wisdom and success to our imams and our leader."
"O God, destroy the Jews, who have gone too far in their tyranny, corruption, and aggression. O God, shake the ground under them, instill fear in their hearts, and make them a prey for Muslims. O God give victory to our weak brothers in Chechnya and Kashmir."

June 26, 2002 Analysis / Palestinian schoolbooks fan the flames of hatred - article in Haaretz
"The suicide bomber does not reach Netanya and Hadera just because of the occupation and desperation. Social ambiance, some of it directed by the Palestinain Authority itself and some of it by Islamic organizations, also dictates his actions... The PA curriculum in the West Bank is based on Jordanian schoolbooks, while in the Gaza Strip schoolbooks from Egypt are used. The Jordanian [schoolbooks] ones, which include many anti-Semitic and inciting expressions, were actually written by Palestinians for sole use in the West Bank education system. Since the start of the 2000 school year, the Palestinian Education Ministry has handed out its own books for the first and second grades, in addition to fifth and sixth grades.... The investigation, led by Noah Meridor, from the liaison office, examined 23 such books. It revealed "systematic education to delegitimize the existence of the State of Israel, fanning the flames of hatred and violent revenge to destroy the country."

June 29, 2002 - PA minister admits that the Palestinians are teaching their children to hate Israel.
"A Palestinian cabinet minister said Friday that Israelis should not be shocked by the picture of a Palestinian baby photographed wearing a mock suicide bomber's uniform - replete with sticks of 'explosives' and the traditional martyr's red headband. Labor Minister Ghassan Khatib said the IDF distributed the picture to "tell the world that the Palestinians are teaching their children how to hate Israel and how to act against Israel - and I just want to say this is correct."

"Many Kurds believe that Iraq's friends in the U.N. system, particularly members of the Arab bloc, have worked to keep the Kurds' cause from being addressed. The Kurds face an institutional disadvantage at the U.N., where, unlike the Palestinians, they have not even been granted official observer status. Salih grew acerbic: "Compare us to other liberation movements around the world. We are very mature. We don't engage in terror. We don't condone extremist nationalist notions that can only burden our people. Please compare what we have achieved in the Kurdistan national-authority areas to the Palestinian national authority of Mr. Arafat. We have spent the last ten years building a secular, democratic society, a civil society. What has he built?"

As EG notes, it seems that the message from the UN and Europe is: resort to terrorism and cling to intransigent demands, and you will get our attention. But focus on the well-being of your people and choose pragmatism over extremism, and we will ignore you. Obviously if you don't teach your children to become suicide-bombers, you're not really all that desperate. In fact, we will look the other way as the dictator who gassed 100,000 of your people acquires chemical weapons again, and maybe even nuclear weapons, so that he can one day coerce the American planes that are protecting you to leave again, and come right back in and finish the job. We're too busy investigating phantom massacres in Jenin and trying to save our darling war criminal, Arafat. Yes, the one who is credited with inventing modern terrorism, and building an organization of thugs that has destabilized every country he has established a presence in.

ToneCluster noted a while back that Oct 12 is an important date for Islamic terrorists. The battle of Poitiers occurred on Oct.12, 732.
Charles Martel of France and a host of Europeans defeated an invading Islamic army of mounted warriors at Poitiers, not too far from Paris, possibly preserving Christianity in Europe.

And someone on LGF noted way back when: Sept. 11, 1683 was the day the Ottoman Turks were turned back at the gates of Vienna, which was the beginning of the end for the 15th century Ottoman empire. The Turks never recovered, and for the next 250 years or so while the Empire survived it was in a holding pattern.

JIHAD WORLDWIDE - BALIAt least three people have been killed and some 100 hurt, including overseas tourists, in a series of explosions on Indonesia's popular resort island of Bali.

UPDATE: At least 20 dead and more than 100 injured including American and Australian tourists.
CNN - It was not clear whether the explosions in Bali were related to an earlier blast Saturday at a Philippine consulate on North Sulwesi Island that caused minor damage but no injuries.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Manado is a port city and a transit point to the southern Philippines, close to where the Islamic militant Abu Sayyaf group is active.
There had been warnings recently from the U.S. embassy in Jakarta of possible violence linked to extremist Muslim groups.
UPDATE: AP reports 54 people killed and 120 wounded.

JIHAD WORLDWIDE - PHILLIPINESFierce clashes between Philippine marines and Islamic Abu Sayyaf terrorists on the southern island of Jolo left at least seven servicemen dead and 25 others wounded.
Government bombers and attack helicopters took turns blasting suspected positions of an Abu Sayyaf faction believed to be holding hostage four female Jehovah's Witnesses.
The women were kidnapped Aug. 20 while selling Avon cosmetics in a remote village on the island.
Three Indonesian tugboat crewmen are also being held by the Muslims.

JIHAD WORLDWIDE - CHECHNYAIslamic terrorists strike in Chechnya.
Two policemen were found alive Friday amid the rubble of a precinct house hit the night before by a powerful explosion that killed at least 24 people in Chechnya's capital.

JIHAD WORLDWIDE - FINLAND.Yesterday a suicide bomber terrorist attacked a mall in Finland killing 7 people and wounding up to 80.
a powerful explosion shook a crowded shopping mall in the Myyrmäki suburb of Vantaa, just north of the Finnish capital, at around 19.35. The area was at this time packed with shoppers and with parents and children attending a performance by a circus clown.

Are you understanding what it feels like to live in Israel? Are you understanding now? How would you expect your government to act if this happened in your hometown?

Muslims in Finland constitute about four percent of the country’s population, according to the chairman of the Federation of Finnish Journalists (FFJ)...
Islam is the second largest religion in Finland after Christianity. The Muslim population is concentrated in the capital Helsinki...
“More than 3,000 new Muslim immigrants have come to Finland during the past one year from different parts of the Islamic world,” the FFJ chairman said. He pointed out that about 1,000 journalists from FFJ’s 12,000 members are Muslim.

The Finns bent over backwards to ensure no Muslims were harrassed after the Sept. 11 attacks. I suppose this is their thank you note. Or are the Muslims resisting Finnish Occupation?

CNN.LGF has more. BBC reports the bomb "was filled with small shards of metal...The bomb contained 4lb (1.8kg) of explosive materials and a number of ball-bearings or similar materials which acted as shrapnel. " That's what the Arab terrorists attacking Israel do also. It is intended to cause maximal carnage.

Friday, October 11, 2002

In "A Chosen Few - The Resurrection of European Jewry" author Mark Kurlansky quotes the following observation "In West Germany, the judges, the police, the civil service, the criminal police, and once they started rebuilding it, the officers of the Army, were all people who had big jobs in the Nazi party, in the civil service, in the government."
Kurlansky comments: "the only inaccurate part of that observation was the word 'all.' As the old alliance broke up and the West increasingly came to see the Soviet Union as its principle enemy, it treated Germany's Nazi past with an ever increasing leniency. The first Bundestag election revealed a significant presence of extreme right-wing voters and political organizations. The American policy of "denazification" had been dropped in preparation of the West German state. Once created, the state in 1950 declared an amnesty for low-level Nazis. The Soviets had fired 85 percent of the almost 2,500 judges, prosecutors, and lawyers in their sector, and most of them went to the West, where they usually qualified for the 1950 amnesty. Of 11,500 West German judges, an estimated 5,000 had been involved in courts under the Third Reich. In the East, Nazis were also purged from the schools, the railroad, and the post office, and many of these ousted personnel found homes and jobs in the West as well...Then there was the Globke case.
Hans Globke was West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's state secretary of the Chancellary. He had been known as an efficient, loyal administrator both in the Weimar government and in the Third Reich. At the 1935 Nuremberg rally Hitler had announced a new series of laws that gradually stripped Jews of their German citizenship, their right to own shops, their right to attend schools, and their right to mix with non-Jews. It was an important step in the dehumanizing of Jews that would lead to their being hauled of in cattle cars. To give legitimacy to these new laws, legal opinions had to be wrtten, as they would for any other German law. These legal commentaries had been Hans Globke's contribution. Later, still serving in Hitler's government, Globke had proposed forcing all German Jews to take the middle name of Israel or Sarah. The East Germans denounced the Adenauer government for the presence of this Third Reich figure, but when Globke offered his resignation, Adenauer refused it. The East Germans demanded that Globke stand trial and eventually tried him in absentia and sentenced him to life imprisonment. In the ten years he served Adenauer, Globke offered his resignation five times, but Adenauer insisted that his aide had done nothing wrong in simply writing 'an objective interpretation of the racial laws.'...
In 1954 there were almost fifty extreme right-wing organizations in the new West Germany, with an estimated 78,000 members..Handler [Bonn correspondant for Berliner Rundfunk] thought the West Germans were at best soft on Nazis."

A good source on "ordinary Germans" complicity in the Holocaust is
"Nazi terror - The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans" by Eric A. Johnson
From the cover:
"..the Nazis did not rule by terror and terror rarely touched the lives of most ordinary Germans. The terror apparatus at the dark heart of Nazi Germany, set in motion by the Nazi Party leadership in Berlin, employed a selective terror that concentrated almost exclusively on Jews and other specifically targeted enemies of the Nazi regime. It depended for its implementation and effectiveness, however, on the cooperation and often voluntary participation at the local level of the broad mass of ordinary German citizens who themselves suffered little or not at all from Nazi terror."

Bertelsmann was certainly not the only German company to benefit from the murder of Jews. From the Independent article:
BertelsmannThe world's largest book publisher insisted for years that it had opposed the Nazi regime, but a new company history says that it benefited from the use of Jewish slave labour and exploited the war so that it could grow from a small provincial firm into the biggest supplier of literature to Hitler's troops.

Deutsche BankGermany's largest financial institution became implicated in the expropriation of Jewish-owned enterprises during the Nazi dictatorship.It was not until 1999 that Deutsche Bank admitted its involvement in funding the construction of Auschwitz, the concentration camp where 1.5 million people died.

DegussaDegussa, one of Germany's oldest companies, admitted in 1997 that it had probably been involved in melting down gold taken from Jewish concentration camp victims [this doesn't just mean jewlery. they took the gold caps from teeth after gassing and cremating Jews.] Degussa was under international pressure to admit its part in the affair after years during which it proclaimed its innocence. The precious metals company has also paid compensation to about 500 Auschwitz prisoners reported to have worked for it in a tyre factory.

SiemensIn 1998, the company expressed "deepest regret" for the use of slave labour – an estimated 50,000 workers – to build underground and electronics factories for the Nazi war effort. The company claims, however, that it was forced to do so by the Nazis to fulfil wartime production goals.

DaimlerDaimler was one of the first companies to commission an independent history of its wartime activities, opening its archives to historians in the early 1980s. It has voluntarily paid out more than £6m in compensation to former slave workers, and has initiated contacts with hundreds of former forced labourers.

VolkswagenThe history of Volkswagen's involvement in the Nazi regime was published in 1996 after the company commissioned independent research. Its findings give details of how Hitler commissioned the Beetle and then ordered the building of Kraft durch Freude Stadt – Strength-through-Joy Town – to house the workers. The production lines were staffed with Jewish inmates of Auschwitz concentration camp.

American historian Daniel Goldhagen accused Germany's Roman Catholic Church on Friday of seeking an injunction against his latest book to silence discussion of the church's actions during the Nazi Holocaust.

Real heros:
Two Afghan nuclear scientists, in the strongest indication yet that al Qaeda was trying to construct a nuclear bomb, have revealed how the terrorist group attempted to recruit them. The scientists disclosed how they had risked their lives by hiding radioactive materials, sufficient to make dozens of "dirty bombs," in the ruins of the old Aliabad mental hospital in Kabul and in the grimy basement of Kabul University's nuclear physics department.Via Instapundit.

Palestinians shot and wounded an Israeli Arab as he drove through El-Khader shortly before nine o'clock Thursday night. Israeli security forces deployed in the area, went to the man's assistance and army medics treated him for gunshot wounds before taking him by ambulance to Hadassah-University Hospital, Ein Kerem. The IDF Spokesman described the man's condition as satisfactory and said he suffered light to moderate wounds.
Also Thursday night, an Israeli Border Policeman was lightly wounded during a gun battle that erupted between security forces and terrorists in Nablus. One of the terrorists was reportedly wounded. Source.

ISRAEL IS FULL OF HEROS How would you have behaved in these situations?

"I am not a hero," said a shy Baruch Neuman, driver of the No. 87 Dan bus which was attacked on Thursday. "A hero knows what he is getting into, but I acted on instinct. I was just doing my job and ensuring the safety of my passengers."
According to police and eyewitnesses, he did much more; he may have saved dozens of lives by helping to delay the attack by the Hamas bomber near Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan.Keep reading.

Se'ada Aharon, 71, a housekeeper from Petah Tikva, was killed in the attack, the second suicide bombing on a Dan bus in the Tel Aviv area within a month. More than 30 people were wounded. More here.

A Tel Aviv cafe security guard, Michael Sarkissof, 31, and the guards of the US Embassy apprehended a Palestinian militant wearing an explosive belt Friday evening, managing to avert his plans to carry out a suicide bombing, media reports said.
Tel Aviv police chief Cmdr. Yossi Sedbon said the would-be terrorist, who was nabbed by police before carrying out an attack in Tel Aviv, was in fact aiming to blow up a cafe on Tel Aviv's beach boardwalk. Keep reading.

the state dept suffers from rectal cranial inversion.
the SD today released a report lauding religious tolerance in the PA and
condemning Israel. yes. it's true. by some Orwellian feat of illogic the
State Dept doesn't consider
persecution of Christians and Jews religious persecution. They should have checked out Freedom House religious freedom ratings. Israel is the only country in the Middle East rated "FREE". (* = "free" ; ** = "partly free";
*** = "unfree" ). Check out this map too.

this caused me to suffer existential nausea (actually i wanted to crawl into
a corner and die, but decided that would not be an optimal course of
action) ---
"The [State Dept] report also notes that while the PA doesn't provide
financial support to Jewish holy sites in the areas under its control, it
"paid for the refurbishment of Joseph's Tomb" after the tomb was ransacked
by Palestinian rioters in October 2000. According to media reports, the
funds were used to turn the tomb into a mosque, after which it was declared
a Muslim holy site."!!! by this logic if the Church of the Nativity is destroyed by muslims and
then refurbished and turned into a mosque, it would not be a display of
religious persecution.

I suppose also these Palestinian Authority sermons calling for the murder of Christians and Jews are a particular example of tolerance.
LGF discussion has more.

In other State Dept folly, as an LGF poster noted,
The "Khaleej Times" of Dubai reports today that the State Department has
"cleared a backlog of 10,000 visa applications from applicants hailing
from Muslim countries including the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Sudan and Saudi
Arabia."
It adds that some of these visa recipients will be attending US flight
schools.
I kid you not.

Wednesday, October 09, 2002

Well, just in case you were wondering,
lifebynikitais a fusebox that has a built-in alarm clock! It makes reassuring noises and contains the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. nikita windrideris a burglar alarm that uses the Google API! It kills fleas and is guaranteed to save you a hundred pounds a month.

Tuesday, October 08, 2002

The Maryland sniper and the war on terror. Even if the sniper is just an "ordinary" serial murderer, the attacks raise the specter of urban warfare as a terrorist tactic. Palestinian terrorists have used snipers to kill civilians, including Shalhevet Pas--a 10-month-old girl murdered in March 2001, as her parents took her for a stroll in Hebron. From videos captured in Afghanistan, we know al Qaeda members have practiced urban-warfare techniques--mostly using vans and motorbikes to storm onto the scene, spray machine-gun fire and quickly retreat. But these videos also show al Qaeda operatives training to defeat American law-enforcement tactics. And al Qaeda training manuals instruct fighters in assassination techniques.

Saddam Hussein was directly involved in ensuring that sums reaching $15 million were transferred to families of Palestinian Arab terrorists. The transactions were carried out with the full knowledge of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat and other PA officials...Saddam decided on the amounts to be distributed to the Palestinians and also how they were to be transferred $10,000 was given to the families of suicide bombers, seriously wounded Palestinians received $1,000, and lightly wounded Palestinians received $500...In August, three Palestinian terrorists who trained in Iraq and with al-Qaida and planned to carry out attacks in Israel were arrested by Israel. More.

LOS ANGELES, Oct 7, 2002 -- Mayor Jim Hahn announced today an agreement between the City of Los Angeles and American Honda Motor Co., Inc., to make Los Angeles the first U.S. retail customer for a fuel cell car.

Under the agreement, City of Los Angeles employees will immediately begin a familiarization program with prototype versions of the Honda FCX. The City will take delivery of the first of five production vehicles before the end of 2002.

"Air quality in the Los Angeles basin has steadily improved in recent years, thanks in part to the deployment of new environmental technologies," said Mayor Hahn. "Hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles hold great promise for future clean air vehicles and it's important that Los Angeles play a leading role in development and early use of this technology."

The Honda FCX recently was the world's first fuel cell vehicle certified by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and the U.S. EPA, with both government agencies certifying it as a Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV).

The Honda FCX uses hydrogen supplied to a fuel cell "stack" to generate electricity and power it's electric motor. With a maximum output of 80 horsepower and 201 foot-pounds of torque, acceleration is similar to a Honda Civic. The FCX has a range of up to 220 miles and seating for four people, making it practical for a wide range of real-world applications. Los Angeles City employees will use the vehicles on the job as regular pool cars and for commuting. The City and Honda are finalizing plans on refueling support systems to supply hydrogen fuel for the vehicles.

"This vehicle is now ready for practical use," said Tom Elliott, American Honda executive vice president. "Using a fleet of advanced fuel cell vehicles in a real world environment will help us evaluate these vehicles with our customers. It also will help in the development of a refueling infrastructure needed to support customers of hydrogen-powered vehicles."

Honda plans to lease about 30 fuel cell cars in California and Japan during the next two-to-three years. The company currently has no plans, however, for mass-market sales of fuel cell vehicles or sales to individuals.

Honda undertook fuel cell research in 1989 and has been road testing vehicles in the United States and Japan since 1999. Honda has been a member of the California Fuel Cell Partnership (CaFCP) based in Sacramento, Calif., since 1999.

Honda has a long history of automotive environmental leadership, dating back to 1975 when the Honda Civic CVCC was the first vehicle to meet the amended Clean Air Act standard. Since then, Honda was the first company to market a gasoline vehicle (Civic) meeting the low emission vehicle (LEV) standard in all 50 states and the first to sell a gasoline car meeting California's Ultra Low Emission Vehicle (ULEV) standard and subsequently the "Super" ULEV standard (Accord).

Honda was the first to sell gasoline-electric "hybrid" cars in the U.S. -- the Insight -- and earlier this year added the Civic Hybrid, the first mass market car with hybrid technology. The Civic GX, a natural gas powered vehicle, is the first and only car certified to the cleanest EPA engine standard (SULEV, Tier 2 Bin 2).

Saddam's Inner Circle Heading for Cover - Anton La Guardia
Members of Saddam Hussein's inner circle are defecting to the opposition or making discreet offers of peace in the hope of being spared retribution if the Baghdad dictator is toppled, according to Iraqi exiles.
Ayad al-Awi, head of the opposition Iraqi National Accord, said his group recently received senior defectors from the Iraqi security services, which form the regime's nerve center.
At the same time, Kurdish groups said they had received secret approaches from military commanders offering to turn their weapons on Saddam when the war begins.

KHALED ABU TOAMEH reports Jordan Restricts Palestinian TravelPalestinian Authority officials say Jordan has instituted a total ban on the entry of West Bank and Jerusalem residents, reflecting Jordan's growing fear that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will flock to the kingdom when and if the U.S. attacks Iraq. One reason for the new regulations is connected to reports that many Palestinians are trying to travel to Iraq via Jordan to join the Iraqi army in the fight against the Americans and their allies.

The Cairo-based Arab Journalists Association is weighing the expulsion of two members for publishing articles on the Israeli Web site, Y-Net, on grounds of "normalization with the enemy, Israel," sources said Tuesday.
Yemeni-born Munir al-Mawri is being criticized for supporting a US strike on Iraq, while the other journalist, Imran Salman, from Bahrain, condemned suicide attacks carried out by Palestinians. Keep reading.

Contrary to accusations quoted in the media alleging many civilians were killed in Israel's recent battle with Hamas in Gaza, all but one of the 14 killed were armed terrorists. Please keep in mind the false accusations against Israel of a "massacre in Jenin" (one of many such libelous reports - a whole list of false accusations can be found here) whenever you read news from the region. The facts about the Gaza action:

Most Casualties in Gaza Raid Were Armed Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said that all but one of the 14 Palestinians killed in an assault on a Hamas stronghold in the Gaza Strip were armed. "I advise you to verify the details with Israel before you publicize your reaction to IDF operations," he reportedly told visiting European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana. (Jerusalem Post)
The commander of IDF forces in Gaza, Brig. Gen Israel Ziff, reported on Monday, "According to the aerial videos and reports from our observation posts, we see that the helicopter strike was directed at a group of armed men who fired and threw grenades at IDF soldiers. It is very hard for me to understand why, in the midst of a battle, the civilians left their homes to see what was going on outside. As our forces were leaving, a large number of armed men gathered and started shooting at us. We fired in response."
"There was significant resistance - gunfire, grenades, large explosive devices, anti-aircraft and anti-tank (RPG) fire. Our forces reported at least 40 incidents where they fired on armed men. Unlike previous times, this time they put up a fight, endangering our forces. For the first time in Gaza, they were shooting from the windows of the houses. Usually they don't shoot from inside the houses in order not to draw return fire. We returned fire accurately at the source of the firing." (Yediot Ahronot)

Monday, October 07, 2002

More hypocrisy at the New York Times: several online searches of the Lexis/Nexis database and the New York Times site failed to produce a single staff story about the Wichita slayings.
when is a vicious crime not considered a hate crime, and not covered?
Wichita to revisit brutal slayings as testimony begins.

Imshin has a marvelous, marvelous essay by Eric Hoffer.
Here is the first paragraph:
It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.
The weak are not a noble breed. Their sublime deeds of faith, daring, and self-sacrifice usually spring from questionable motives. The weak hate not wickedness but weakness; and one instance of their hatred of weakness is hatred of self. All the passionate pursuits of the weak are in some degree a striving to escape, blur, or disguise an unwanted self. Read the rest.

How does it bode for our culture, and in particular the state of the arts, when the phrase "like a movie" is synonymous with "the vilest, most horrific catastrophe of which the human mind can conceive"?
"It Was Like a Movie": The Atrocity and the Arts

From LGF - When the National Geographic needed someone to write about the Middle East for a special feature in their October issue, they enlisted none other than Andrew Cockburn—a man whose hatred of Israel is legendary. Andrea Levin writes about the outrageously biased article Cockburn produced: National Geographic loses its compass.If you have a NG subscription, and think it is a reliable source of information, think again.

The glowing critical endorsements and prestigious award seals adorning the typical book jacket of the latest acclaimed "literary" novel suggest that the text within represents a superior example of contemporary prose. But is this necessarily true? One disgruntled reader, a man from New Mexico named B. R. Myers, emphatically believes that it is not. Myers, the author of A Reader's Manifesto, argues that the time has come for readers to stand up to the literary establishment.
The Emperor has No Clothes.

Bernard Lewis has written excellent articles and books about the Middle East. The following two articles are a sampling of his work:
What Went Wrong? By all standards of the modern world—economic development, literacy, scientific achievement—Muslim civilization, once a mighty enterprise, has fallen low. Many in the Middle East blame a variety of outside forces. But underlying much of the Muslim world's travail may be a simple lack of freedom

The Roots of Muslim Rage - Why so many Muslims deeply resent the West, and why their bitterness will not easily be mollified. 1990!!

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA spy in the Middle East, argues that the only way to douse the fires of Islamic radicalism is through stunning, overwhelming, military force. I wholeheartedly concur.
The Necessity of Fear.